Didn’t pay a bribe, didn’t get the project: Mallika Sarabhai

The earliest memory of anything to do with corruption is an evening with my father. He had flown in from Delhi and ran up the steps of the house to meet us. I saw him from the top of the steps and he looked stricken, white. Concerned, I asked what the matter was. He looked at me in great pain and said, “Malli, they think I am bribeable”. The year must have been 1968 or ‘69. Papa was chairman of the atomic energy commission and in charge of India’s space  programme. A foreign government had just offered him $2 million if he could get India to buy their know-how. I have never forgotten his look or the horror in his mind — that in spite of all he had stood for, all the transparency, someone would think he had a price.

My own first encounter with such a situation came soon after I had started dancing professionally. We had been performing in Ujjain and had to catch a train back to Ahmedabad at 1 am. My mother was with me, as was a woman singer who had recently undergone a surgery. The train came and we all crowded into the first class section, 20 of us with all our props and costumes. Once the train started moving — it was a two minute halt — we started looking for our berths. The entire coach was full, including all our reserved berths.

The ticket checker came. My mother and the musician were seated outside the smelly loo on one of our trunks. “Sorry. These reservations are wrong. You will have to spend the night standing. There are no seats”. We were aghast. The journey was long. Could I make Amma and the sick musician spend those hours sitting on a tin trunk? I didn’t pay the bribe. We didn’t get the seats. They sat it out all night like the rest of us, besides the stinking loo.

It was many years later that I was yet again confronted with the graft menace. I had been running our organisation, Darpana, for many years. Darpana had been working with NGOs and government agencies for using the arts effectively for development communication, to speak of issues as difficult as domestic violence and child abuse.

We had worked with NACO and others on educating the public about HIV. An ad in the local newspapers caught my eye. Some department of the Gujarat government needed a plan for HIV awareness and had a Rs1 crore budget. We had (and still have) done the maximum work in the field and with repeated successes as measured by surveys and studies. We applied for the project.

A month or so later a ‘friend’ called. “You are on top of the list for the project. But the officers concerned know your reputation. They want Rs10 lakh. Think about it this way, Mallika. If you get the work, the Rs90 lakh will actually go towards HIV work. If another agency gets it, not even Rs10 lakh will go towards the actual work. Don’t you care enough about the HIV question to want the major portion of the money to be spent for the cause?” I didn’t pay the bribe. I don’t know what happened to the project.

There have been occasions since. I haven’t got the work, or got the work done. To the best of my knowledge, I haven’t paid a bribe.

The writer is a well-known danseuse and an activist